The invention disclosed herein relates generally to the art of loading articles into containers and more particularly to a method and apparatus for loading fresh meat articles into flexible plastic containers.
Meat articles have conventionally been manually loaded into flexible plastic packages for either shipment or display. While many aspects of the meat packaging process have been refined to a high degree of automation, the actual step of placing meat articles into containers has remained a substantially manual operation wherein an operator receives a cut of meat from a conveyor, selects an appropriately sized bag and slides the meat from a shelf into the bag. The subsequent processing steps of vacuumizing, clipping and shrinkage are highly automated but remain dependent upon being supplied from a manual container loading step.
An attempt to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art manual handling of meat cuts is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,942,624 to Kupcikevicius issued Mar. 9, 1976. The apparatus described therein is a bag loading apparatus which comprises a cantilevered conveyor system such that a meat cut may be placed on one end of the conveyor while a bag is draped around the cantilevered end of the conveyor. The movement of the conveyor causes the meat section to move along the conveyor. While this apparatus overcomes many of the shortcomings of the prior art, it necessarily involves the awkward and cumbersome step of manually draping an appropriately sized bag over the end of the cantilevered section. The draping process is particularly burdensome since the bag must have substantially its entire length pulled over the conveyor.